“You are now ready to enter the Casino,” the robot said blandly.
He extended his hand, or rather the blur that was his hand. Within the field, of course, he saw no blur, but looking over his shoulder he caught the mirror’s view of himself and smiled.
The booth opened, and he stepped out into the Casino of Masks.
Mantell stood at the entrance, adjusting to the situation. It seemed to him that he wore nothing, and indeed he felt a faint chill. But as he looked across the long hall, seeing no people but only gray blurs here and there he knew he was utterly anonymous.
He wondered how the conspirators were going to achieve contact with him, cloaked as he was. Or whether there were any conspirators at all.
From the first he had considered the possibility that this was all some elaborate hoax of Thurdan’s making. Well, for that eventuality he was prepared; he would simply tell Thurdan that he was conducting an unofficial investigation, answering the summons in the book because he hoped to unmask the conspirators.
He looked around.
The Casino was equipped with all the usual standard games of chance, but there were also a great many card tables in the back. It seemed logical, Mantell thought. He imagined that bluffing games, such as poker, would be the order of things here. No involuntary facial manifestations could give away strategy here.
But he did not want to get involved in a card game. Instead he drifted across to the rotowheel table. It was as good a place to begin as any.
The table was crowded. It was almost completely surrounded by gesticulating blurred figures, busily placing their bets for the next turn.
In the center of the huge round table was a metal wheel whose enameled surface was covered with numbers. The wheel would swing free and halt at random, and when it halted a beam of light from above would focus sharply on it, singling out a number.
The man who played the winning number was entitled to collect the numerical value of that number from every other player: if he won on number Twelve, everyone present at the table handed in twelve chips to go to him, and paid the house the amount of his own losing number as well, as a forfeit. It was possible to win or lose heavily on the rotowheel in a matter of minutes.
Mantell edged into the crowd. There were some sixty people at the wheel. When he was close enough to bet, he put his money on Twenty-Two.
“You don’t want to do that, mister,” advised a tall blur at his side. The stranger’s voice was as metallic and anonymous as his face; the vocal distortion was a side-effect of the scattering-field, and was a further concealment of the mask.
“Why not?” Mantell asked.
“Because Twenty-Two just came up last time around.”
“The wheel doesn’t remember what number won last time,” Mantell snapped.
“Go ahead, then. Throw your dough away.”
Mantell left his chips where they were. A few minutes later the croupier called time and the wheel started to swing. Around.… around.…
… And came to rest on Forty-Nine. Shrugging, Mantell added forty-nine chips to the twenty-two out there already, and watched while the croupier swept them away. The lucky winner, face an impassive blur behind which was probably an unashamed grin of pleasure, moved forward to collect. His take, Mantell computed, would be nearly three thousand chips. Not bad at all.
Mantell stayed at the board about fifteen minutes, and in that time managed to lose two hundred and eighty chips without much difficulty. Then he cashed in on eleven—he was playing cautiously by then—and came away with winnings amounting to about five hundred chips.
There was, surprisingly, no clock in the Casino, and he had carelessly left his wristwatch back in his room. He had no way of knowing what time it was, but he estimated that it was still short of ten o’clock by some minutes.
While he stood to one side considering which game he should attempt next, a gong sounded suddenly, and the place became quiet. He saw a robot ascend a platform in the center of the hall.
“Attention, please! If the gentleman who recently lost a copy of the book entitled A Study of Hydrogen—Breathing Life in the Spica System will step forward, we will be able to return his book to him at this platform. Thank you.”
The crowd buzzed in puzzled amusement, sensing some sort of joke, but not being sure just what it was. This, Mantell realized, was his message, and it had probably been read off every night during the past week, just in case he had decided to attend.
He paused for a moment, decided that since he had come this far he might as well go through with the rest of it, and made his way forward through the crowd of gaily laughing blurred figures to the dais.
He confronted the robot. “I own the missing book,” he said. “I’m very anxious to have it returned.”
“Of course. Will you come this way, sir?”
Mantell followed the robot back through the crowd to an alcove: near the entrance. They paused there.
“To your left, sir,” the robot said.
A door opened to his left and he stepped through. He entered a booth similar to the one in which he had donned his mask. Only there was a pink blur waiting for him in this one, holding out a copy of a yellow-bound book which looked very familiar.
The blur held the book up so he could see it and said in a mechanical distorted voice, “Is this the book you lost, sir?”
Mantell nodded stiffly. “It is. Thanks very much for returning it. I was very worried about it.”
He stared at the blur, trying vainly to peer behind it and perceive the identity of the other. It was impossible. The waves of light danced mockingly before him, obscuring the face behind them.
He reached out to take the book, but it was gently drawn back out of his reach.
“Not yet, sir,” the other said. “One question first. Have you read this book?”
“No—uh—I mean, yes, I have,” he said, realizing the other was referring to the message between the pages, rather than to the text of the work itself. “Yes, I’ve read it.”
“And are you interested in the subject with which it deals?”
He was silent for a moment, knowing that the “subject” she was talking about could only be the death of Ben Thurdan.
“Yes,” he said finally, “I am. But—who are you?”
“You’ll see. But I must have absolute assurance of secrecy in this matter.”
He looked down at himself and felt sweat running down inside his shirt. “All right. I’ll vow secrecy, if that’s what you want.”
The blur opposite moved slightly, lifting one hand to nudge the activating stud on the right side of the mask. Mantell heard a click—and then the unmasked face of a girl appeared before him. He gasped.
Almost immediately she clicked the studs again, and Mantell saw the delicate features, the star-blue eyes he knew so well, fade into a blurred veil of gray light—and Myra Butler became once more as distantly anonymous as any of the other Casino pleasure-seekers.
It took him a moment to recover from the double shock of seeing Myra revealed for that brief instant and of finding that she was part of the conspiracy against Ben Thurdan. Then pieces of a puzzle began slowly to form into a pattern. He stared steadily at the blur before him.
“Is this a joke?” he asked hoarsely.
“Hardly. It’s been in the planning stage for a long time. Too long, maybe. But we have to gain strength first, before we can take over.”
“Aren’t you afraid to speak so openly in this booth?” Mantell asked, looking around nervously. “Ben seems to have spies everywhere. There might be a pipeline to—”
“No,” she said. “This booth’s all right. The manager of the Casino here is one of us. There isn’t any danger.”
He sat down limply on the bench in the booth. “Okay. Tell me about this thing, then, as long as I’m here. When do you plan to do it?”
Blurred pink lines that might have been soft shoulders lifted in a gentle shrug. “We haven’t set the exact time yet. But we’re cert
ain of one thing: We must get rid of Thurdan.”
Mantell didn’t ask why. He said, “But you’re taking a big chance, aren’t you? How do you know I won’t go running to Ben and tell him all about it? I’m sure he’d be highly interested.”
“You won’t do it,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Your psychprobe patterns. You won’t betray us, Johnny. I saw your charts and I know the sort of a person you are, even if you don’t know yourself. I picked you as one of us from the minute you were probed.”
He sat looking at his fingers and thought about it. He realized that in this the probe had told the truth: it was almost as impossible for him to betray to Thurdan what Myra was telling him as it would be for him to grow wings. She was taking no risk with him.
“How about Marchin?” he asked. “Was he part of this thing, too?”
“No. Marchin knew about us, but he had his own plans. He stayed aloof. That was because he planned to rule the way Ben rules. Alone.”
“And what does your group plan to do?”
“To set up a civilized form of government on Starhaven,” was the steady reply. “To set up a democracy, instead of a tyranny.”
“But tyranny sometimes works out. Ben is doing a good job of running his planet,” Mantell said. “You can’t deny that.”
The blur that was Myra Butler moved from side to side, as if shaking her head in disagreement.
She said, “I won’t try to argue with your statement. Certainly, Ben has Starhaven running on an even keel. But what would happen if he should die today?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I—we know very well what would happen. There would be a fierce scramble for power that would turn this planet into a raging mad-house of civil strife and death. And that’s why we have to kill him and take over the planet ourselves. And nothing less than killing would work; he’s too strong a man to be willing to take part in any other form of government than dictatorship. Ben can’t just be deposed, he has to be put away permanently.”
“I see the logic there. Ben himself is all right as a ruler, but the chances are that the next boss of Starhaven won’t be so enlightened. So you get rid of the boss and the boss system now, and prevent the terrible destructive struggle for the throne before it can begin.”
“You’ve got the idea. Well? Are you with us?”
Mantell hesitated. He was thinking of the giant named Ben Thurdan, who feared dying, and he was thinking also of Myra, and of many possibilities.
There was no longer any doubt in his mind.
“Of course I’m with you!” he said.
She sighed. “Thank God you said that, Johnny. I would have hated to kill you, Darling!”
Chapter Twelve
Knowing of the existence of a plot against Ben Thurdan’s life didn’t keep Mantell from working hard and long on his defense-screen project, even though he was conscious of the irony that success in his research would spell the end of all hopes for an assassination. He was definitely on the track of something, and he didn’t necessarily have to turn it over to Thurdan when he had worked it out. And there would be some use for his personal defense screen, whether it was Thurdan or someone else—himself, perhaps—who benefited from it.
He withdrew almost completely into his laboratory. Myra had warned him not to see her again until everything was settled, and the promise of seeking her later took away most of the pain of not seeing her now.
They met briefly, twice more, in the Casino of Masks during the following week. They identified each other by a prearranged sign and spent a few hours at the tables. But it was a short and unsatisfying contact.
The second time he met her there, Mantell asked her again what was delaying them. His feeling was that they should strike at the first available opportunity. Ben had feed lines of data extending almost everywhere in Starhaven, and the longer they held back and polished their plans, the greater was Thurdan’s chance of discovering their identities and killing both the conspiracy and themselves.
“It’ll come soon, Johnny,” she told him. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces have to be where they belong, to fit exactly and make the picture complete before the game is over.”
Mantell slumped down in his seat, shoulders hunched. “I guess you know what you’re doing,” he said, frowning. “But I don’t like this waiting. I’m getting impatient, and Ben’s bound to find out before long.”
She laughed, and the effect of the mask flattened the laugh into something strange. “You’re impatient? Johnny, we’ve been living with this thing for years. You’ve only been on Starhaven a few weeks!”
After that, he stopped asking questions. Instead he plunged into his laboratory work with furious energy—the energy of seven years of idleness, dammed up and now rushing down the spillway.
He designed cumbersome defense screens that would be too massive for an elephant, and built them, and then refined and reduced them down, down—until, on one model that might be almost the proper size, the field winked out altogether, lacking sufficient strength. And he had to start all over again. He didn’t mind that. Failure at this stage was only to be expected; success was not immediately to be hoped for. And he was working again, doing something, and that was enough.
Hardly a day went by without a call from Thurdan. Mantell learned that Starhaven was going through a period of peace, untroubled by the universe outside, and so Thurdan rarely visited the lab tower in person except when making routine checks.
Until the day of the Space Patrol raid. In a sudden instant, the peace and security of Starhaven was faced with abrupt destruction.
Yet the raid had been going on for almost a full hour before Mantell knew anything about it. His first hint that something was wrong came when the door of his laboratory opened as he bent low over his workbench squinting over microminiaturized positronic disperser and trying to coax them into their proper positions in the template he was building.
Startled, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw Ben Thurdan striding heavily into the, room.
“Hello, Ben. Why the big rush?”
Thurdan’s craggy face was tense. “Bombardment. A fleet of Patrol ships chased some fugitive here, and they’re blasting us. Come with me and I’ll show you something, Mantell. Come on!”
Mantell had to half-run after him down the hall to the central control room.
“What about the fugitive?” he asked, remembering his own arrival. “Did he get in okay?”
“He’s here. An assassin.”
Despite himself Mantell flinched. “What?”
“Killed the President of the Dryelleran Confederation then lit out for here.”
“Did you take him in?”
“Of course. We take everyone in. Harmon’s psychprobing him now. But he brought a Patrol armada behind him. They’ve got some new kind of heavy-cycle gun that I’ve never heard of before. If you listen you can pick up the sound.”
Mantell listened. He heard a dull boom, and it seemed to him that the floor shook just a little. A moment later the boom was repeated.
“That’s it,” Thurdan said. “They’re blasting at our screens.”
He sat at the control console, in the big chair specially constructed to hold his weight, and switched on the visiscreens. Mantell saw the image take shape almost at once: a thick cloud of Patrol ships orbiting beyond Starhaven’s metal skin, wheeling like stallions and discharging incredible bolts of radiant energy.
But now Thurdan was grinning. He emanated all the confidence and joy of an invincible warrior about to enter battle. His thick strong fingers rattled over the controls.
“Our defensive screens can soak all that stuff up, can’t they?” Mantell asked uneasily.
“Most of it. Theoretically, they have unlimited capacity—but those boys up there are really pouring it on!” Thurdan pointed to a bank of meters whose quivering indicators swung dizzily up into the red area that meant overload and dropped back as Starhaven’s enormous power piles drained
away the dangerous excess. And again the Patrol ships slammed down their fierce bolts of force, and still the Starhaven defenses negated them.
“We’ve got to stay on the defensive for a few minutes, still,” said Thurdan. “The load on our screens is too great to give us time to throw out a return blast. But we’ll fix ’em! Watch this.”
Mantell watched.
With strong staccato thrusts of his fingertips over the control boards, Thurdan brought the defense-screens of Starhaven out of synchronized equilibrium, establishing instead a shifting cycle-phase relationship.
“The screens are alternating now,” he grunted. “Give me the differential.”
Mantell squinted up at the dials, found the columns he wanted, and fed the figures rapidly to Thurdan. The big man made delicate adjustments, making mental computations that astonished Mantell.
Finally he sat back, grinning satanically. Sweat was pouring from every pore of his skin.
A chime sounded outside the room. Thurdan muttered, “See what they want, Johnny.”
Mantell darted to the door and opened it. A handful of the defense-screen technicians stood there, pale, puzzled-looking.
Harrell said, “What’s going on in here? The screens are phasing like crazy!”
“Close to overload,” Bryson said.
Mantell smiled. “Ben’s in charge,” he said simply. “Come on in and watch.”
He led them to where Thurdan sat staring broodingly into his vision plates, watching the cloud of orbiting Patrol Ships. There must have been hundreds of them out there, each one smashing every megawatt it could muster into the tough metal hide of Starhaven.
“They’ve been planning this attack for a year,” Thurdan said half to himself, as he made compensating adjustments to absorb the ferocious onslaught. “Waiting for a chance to get this fleet out there and break Starhaven open, once and for all. And they’re so sure they’re going to do it, too—the poor fools!” Then he laughed. “Mantell, are you watching?”
Mantell nodded tensely, too absorbed to speak. He heard the other technicians murmur behind him.
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